Little did I know that Sony had something miraculous up their sleeve. In fact, I'm partially convinced that Sony had no idea that they had something miraculous up their sleeve, either. It's not like they're the most trustworthy studio out there. Sony Pictures Animation is certainly no Pixar or Disney. Although in their defense, not every one of their movies is as bad as "The Emoji Movie." Most people like the "Hotel Transylvania" trilogy, even though I personally think those movies are a bit juvenile. I also rather enjoy both "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" movies as well as some of their lesser known gems like "Arthur Christmas" and "Pirates! Band of Misfits." But then they also have those Smurfs movies, that garbage Christmas movie "The Star," and this year's "Peter Rabbit," which I've been extremely hesitant to give a chance to. That's not a good resume of movies to get me excited about an animated Spider-Man. Yet the teaser trailer that debuted last year had me curious. People who went to Comic-Con this year claimed that footage that they saw was very encouraging. The full-length trailers released shortly after looked spectacular. Then we had "Venom" show a sneak peak of the movie, which had me excited. So it was quite the journey for me, but I eventually jumped on board.
I'm certainly glad I did because this is one heck of a crazy journey that left me absolutely blown away. Despite everything I described in the previous paragraph, I did come to the movie with a bit of hesitation due to the reviews, which were through the roof. That seems like a silly reaction to reviews, but it was initially at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (it's now down to 97 percent) and everyone I heard was calling this one of the best Spider-Man movies ever made, the best animated movie of the year, and one of the best superhero movies of the year, challenging "Infinity War" for that honor. I didn't buy it. I believed that the movie was going to be good, but no way it was going to be THAT good. Right? In the back of my head, I speculated that maybe people were overreacting because of the fact that this is the first on-screen appearance of Miles Morales as Spider-Man, making this another culturally significant film. I mean, I feel many people did that to "Black Panther" earlier this year. A decent movie that is elevated above what it deserves due to its cultural significance. Maybe "Into the Spider-Verse" is getting the same treatment? But no, I don't think that is the case. This movie is genuinely fantastic. I was shocked and amazed at what I saw. The hype is real.
But there's more, in addition to this movie's animation certainly pleasing fans of 2D animation as well as comic book readers, the most impressive thing to me personally is that this is a blend of several different animation styles. This specifically comes into play with several of our side characters, namely Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Ham and Peni Parker. We'll get to their actual characters in a bit, but when Spider-Man Noir was on the screen, we had that old-fashioned black and white, detective style of animation on the screen, because that's what his character is. Laugh at the fact that they brought on Spider Ham, but his style of animation is the Loony Toons style of cartoon animation, which they implemented into this movie when he was featured on the screen. And finally, Peni Parker is a Japanese anime version of the American Spider-Man story, with a young girl in the lead role instead of a young boy. Whenever she was on the screen, the movie was an anime. Even when all of them were on the screen together, along with Miles Morales, Peter Parker and Spider-Gwen, their individual characters were still animated in their individual style, giving us a brilliant and unique mashup of comic book animation, cartoon animation, neo-noir animation and anime.
So yeah, I spent the whole movie being blown away by the animation of this movie. At the exact same time, I was also blown away by the movie itself. We've done the Spider-Man origin story so many times that you would think that we'd all be sick of it by now, but yet "Into the Spider-Verse" somehow manages to do a full-out Spider-Man origin story while still making me glued to the screen the whole time. The biggest difference here is that this is not a Peter Parker origin story, but a Miles Morales origin story. Now I know that there are some people who are so emotionally invested in Miles Morales that having him on screen in and of itself is enough for them to call this a great movie, much like going to Wakanda was enough for people to love "Black Panther." If you are one of those people who love Miles Morales, then you will absolutely be madly in love with what the do with him because they do his character justice. That said, I have no prior emotional investment in Miles Morales, so I was going in with a blank slate. But what they did with this kid's story was so inspiring and so uplifting that I don't think you need to know anything about him going in to completely fall in love with him. After watching this movie, I'm totally on the Miles Morales bandwagon.
If you don't know the specifics of the Miles Morales origin story, I'm not going to tell it to you because I didn't know everything about it going in and thus there were a few surprises in the first part of the movie that I didn't see coming. Yeah, he gets bit by a radioactive spider and becomes Spider-Man. We all know that. But there are a few specifics that are different than the Peter Parker origin story that make this a bit fresh. I will say in a more general sense that this involves Miles' relationship with his dad, his Uncle Aaron and with Peter Parker. His dad is an officer who doesn't like Spider-Man and Miles doesn't have the best relationship with him. His dad tries his hardest to connect with his son, but Miles is just going through a lot of things that your typical teenage kid is going through. Miles does have a great relationship with his Uncle Aaron, who is more of the cool uncle. But his dad and Uncle Aaron, who are brothers, haven't actually talked to each other much, so there's a lot of inner family drama that the movie makes you emotionally invested in. The writing is spot on and the voice acting is also spot on, making this a beautiful story. Once Miles gets his Spider-Man abilities, his connection with Peter Parker is also an interesting one, but I won't say a whole lot about that.
Despite all of this multiverse stuff, I do want to stress that this is not like a Spider-People Avengers movie. This is still a Miles Morales origin story, which is something that I was very impressed with. The movie was able to maintain its focus on Miles Morales and his journey of becoming Spider-Man while also introducing a whole slew of fun characters that I want to see more of. Our main trio is Miles Morales, Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, but we start out with just Miles Morales and Peter Parker as they try to come up with a plan to infiltrate Kingpin's lair despite Miles having no idea what he's doing and Peter not having the best knowledge of how exactly to help him. Gwen comes in a bit later and when she did, I immediately fell in love with her. I think Emma Stone's portrayal of the character in the Amazing Spider-Man movies was sheer genius, making me fall in love with both Emma Stone and Gwen Stacey, so to see her here as an alternate version of Spider-Man, or Spider-Woman as she calls herself, from a different Earth, was pure gold. I now want a full-on Spider-Gwen movie. Impressively, though, she doesn't steal the movie, but rather makes Miles' story even better.
Then we have our three side characters that show up even later than Miles, Peter and Gwen. Those are the three that I talked about above, Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Ham and Peni Parker. Their roles are fairly minor, but they add a lot of great humor. Nicolas Cage plays Spider-Man Noir and he absolutely relishes in this role. In fact, Nicolas Cage does great with animation as I also loved him in "The Croods" and now he has two pretty solid roles in 2018 as Superman in "Teen Titans Go! To the Movies" and as Spider-Man Noir in "Into the Spider-Verse." Spider-Ham is the weirdest of the bunch, but it's a crazy weird that I really love. He's not a pig that got bit by a radioactive spider like you might think. He's a spider that got bit by a radioactive pig. And that's about all you need to know. He's crazy and loony and I absolutely loved it. And then we have Peni Parker. This is were fans of anime are going to go crazy because her character humorously implements just about every anime trope. Again, all three of these characters, in addition to Peter and Gwen, don't step on Miles Morales' origin story at all. They aren't distractions. Rather they are there as a support to Miles. But I'm not going to lie, I would love to see individual movies of all of them, which is how you properly set up a shared universe.
I think the only negative thing I came up with for this movie, outside the animation being a bit jarring at first, was that this was the second best Kingpin that we've seen this year. Kingpin, aka Wilson Fisk, in the now cancelled "Daredevil" show from Netflix is one of the most brilliantly written and portrayed comic book villains ever in my opinion. Thus this version of Kingpin had huge shoes to fill and even though he's not awful by any means, he was probably the most forgettable element of the movie. In fact, the movie has a lot of villains thrown in there and the best thing I can say about them is their animation style comes straight from the comic books, making them a lot of fun. But that's more of a nitpick than anything. It didn't take anything away from my experience as a whole. The movie is a ton of fun. It had a lot of moments that had be busting up laughing. It's extremely emotional and powerful. All the characters are brilliantly written with great voice acting. It's honestly one of the best Spider-Man movies I've seen, behind only "Spider-Man 2." It's not too far behind "Infinity War" for best superhero movie of the year and challenges "Isle of Dogs" for best animated movie of the year. As such, I'm going to award "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" a strong 9/10.
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